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By 2019 the mining industry will need 78,000 new U.S. workers

Bloomberg did a story yesterday with an eye-catching headline, reporting that recent graduates of the relatively obscure South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City are earning more than Harvard graduates. The piece referred to a compensation survey from Pay Scale.com, which tracks the compensation data of graduates from U.S. colleges. The median starting salary for Harvard grads, $54,100, is less than the $56,700 earned by graduates of the South Dakota school.

Beneath that nugget of information, the Bloomberg piece included some useful information on a profession that is growing and will continue to grow at least for the next half dozen years, according to industry groups: mining engineer. At the same time, there won’t be enough people trained in the specialty to fill those jobs. That phenomenon will continue to drive salaries higher.

According to a January report by the Society of Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration, the mining industry will need 78,000 new U.S. workers to replace retirees and feed an industry that has been surging after a decade of a bull market in commodities. At the same time, U.S. colleges have been cutting back on mining programs, partly because the mining business shrunk between 1993 and 2004. According to estimates by the National Mining Association, there were 58,000 people employed in metals mining in 1993. That number shrank to just 28,000 in 2004, but in 2011, it climbed to 40,000.

Looking ahead, the demand for workers will only increase, according to mining groups. Meantime, because universities have cut back on courses in earth sciences, mineral geology and mine engineering, there is a severe shortage of workers. Bloomberg reports that only 14 schools in the U.S. offer programs in mining engineering, down from 30 schools in 1982. In 2011, there were only 178 graduates who majored in mining engineering, down from 700 in 1982. Even at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, of 259 students who graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree, only 17 majored in mining engineering. At Harvard, a spokesman told Bloomberg that “virtually zero, if not zero” of its engineering graduates go into mining.

For U.S. graduates willing to move overseas, there are also plenty of jobs. According to the Society of Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration report, in Australia, the world’s biggest shipper of coal and iron ore, there will be a shortage of 1,700 mine engineers in the five years ending in 2015.